Some communities have pinned posts that explain their community in more detail, but I generally agree with you.

This was a problem on reddit too, and it looks like it’s carried over here. People make new communities and just assume that everyone in the future who finds it will just automatically know the purpose.

Way back on Olde Usenet in the 1990s, there was a whole voting process for creating new forums ("newsgroups"), where you had to get supporters to say they would actually use your new forum if you created it. Creating the new forum soc.women.lesbian-and-bi required a whole democratic voting process, and it passed!

soc.women.lesbian-and-bi is a moderated newsgroup which passed its vote for creation by 458:56 as reported in news.announce.newgroups on 14 Aug 1995.

Alternately, you could create your new forum in the alt space, where you just had to have an argument in alt.config about creating the new forum.

Either way, the theory was that real news servers would only carry your forum if you won a vote and/or argument about it. The point of this was, supposedly, that cluttering-up the list of forums with a bunch that nobody was using would be a bad idea, so it would be valuable to show that people wanted a forum before creating it.

In practice, this depended on the ability & interest of news server admins to follow the democratic and/or anarchic processes for the creation of new groups.

Agreed! I started a community a couple days ago and I also browsed through the descriptions of other communities to get an idea of what we should put in one (I have no experience moderating subreddits or anything like that) and I found that many had little to nothing in the sidebar.

Rules included would be good too. I don't know if I can post external links or discussion sometimes.

I agree. If they can't take the time to write anything in the sidebar or have a community image, I lose interest pretty quickly.

I was messing up with my community, added the description pretty early, just completed the whole shebang with rules, game season info, links,...

Yes, it's a continuation attampt of the reddit variant, as it looks like the other mods have left that sub as well. I'm still there, lurking, but it's dying after a vote to stay. The main contributers went silent there and moved to the community discord server.

I'm doing my best! This is my first time modding, and I'm not sure how to run a good community. Feel free to stop by any of my communities and suggest better sidebar content and I promise I'll update it.

c/menopause is pretty much self-explantory

You might be able to make a [Meta] post in said community and ask for the sidebar to be expanded. Who knows, maybe it’ll work.

Yeah its really weird. Instead they leave the default info about the server its on.

Those ones with words that i don't recognize - i usually assume it's a video game.

I'm pretty confident if people expect you to participate in their community they either want you to already know about it, or learn about it through osmosis by not telling you the insular gatekeeped references.

If it's something you should know and you're either young or just one of those rare things you've never encountered... You're on the internet dude. Use Google lol.